One of the pleasures of Sunday afternoons in my pottery is listening to Open Book - one of Radio 4's better literary efforts. Presented by the wonderfully husky Mariella Frostrup (please will she come and read me some bedtime stories?), it often features reviews of books or authors I'd never otherwise read.

Last Sunday's got off to an interesting start with an interview with Richard Dawkins, who isn't as trenchant about literature as he is about what he sees as the misguidedness of religion (he wrote The God Delusion).

However, I was spluttering into my tea when I heard this exchange:

Mariella Frostrup: 'He [Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, 1998 Nobel Prize winner] often writes in parables, doesn't he?'

Amanda Hopkinson: 'Yes, and one of his most parabolic novels is Blindness... '

Ms Hopkinson is a translator, so one might imagine that words are her profession. Maths obviously is not!

Although I didn't ever formally study stats at university, I like to think I have a reasonable appreciation of their simpler points.

So, I am always surprised at how ignorant most otherwise intelligent people seem to be about probabilities. BBC's Working Lunch featured a piece on the cost of insurance following the summer floods in Yorkshire. Rob Pittam spoke to Sheffield's Floods Czar (now there's a title to impress the girls with!).

As the Czar stood on the banks of the Don, pontificating about the high cost of business insurance after the floods, Rob replied that if he made a claim in his own insurance, he expected to pay higher premiums. Mr Czar said something along the lines of "Well, it's all based on the risk, isn't it? You could say that we're at less risk than other places because we had floods this year, so we probably won't get any more for another 100 years."

No, stupid. The actual risk is just the same every year.

I do wish interviewers would pick up on daft talk like this and correct it.